ook, I am sure that back in the Before Times or even in the early stages of the pandemic, it seemed like a very good idea to repackage one of lovely Michael Palin’s loveliest trips, through the Himalaya and its environs in 2004, and have him reflect on it and his younger self from the comfort of his own home in Michael Palin’s Himalaya: Journey of a Lifetime (BBC Two). The viewers would get the highlights of the six-part series condensed into one 90-minute jaunt and a restorative dose of Palin, the BBC would get a relatively cheap hour and a half to fill the schedule in straitened circumstances, and at no point would one of our greatest national treasures be killed by overexertion or Covid. Win-win-win. Except that now we are immersed in the pandemic era, and intimations of mortality shadow us everywhere, it becomes virtually impossible to avoid the sense that this has been designed as – or at the very least is functioning as – Palin’s swansong. As the hagiographic tributes from talking heads mount up, you are dragged reluctantly to the conclusion that this will be the thing they show when … when the time comes that a televisual obituary is required. And that’s even before 94-year-old Sir David Attenborough turns up to comment on the snow-capped mountains and the art of conveying the essence of a place to those watching at home and inadvertently remind us that … well … you know, and oh God, I am too emotionally fragile for all this. The Himalaya, of course, remains. Let’s focus on that. The 2004 Palin starts off at the Khyber Pass, staring out at the view that once confronted Alexander and Tamburlaine the Greats, then heads east through Pakistan and northern India, through Nepal, Tibet, China, other Indian states and finally Bhutan and Bangladesh. Entries into the repackaged hit parade include his visit to Darra Adam Khel, a town full of bazaars at which the local gunsmiths sell their replica Kalashnikovs and assorted other first-rate counterfeit weapons; enjoying a communal meal at the Golden Temple in Amritsar; marvelling at the different approaches to death in other cultures as the barefoot Hindu pallbearers in Pashupatinath temple in Kathmandu bring the bodies to public funeral pyres for cremation; and crossing paths with a tribe that well within living memory was still headhunting. We watch him battle altitude sickness in the mountains themselves (“Stop moaning, Palin!” he chides, long after most of us would have lain down and started begging to be airlifted home). And of course his meeting with the Dalai Lama makes the cut. His Holiness turns out to be a fan of the BBC and a keen viewer of Palin’s documentaries, which is all jolly nice. I’m presuming Palin made more of the opportunity to speak to the exiled spiritual leader of the Tibetan people in the original series, but the decision to excise whatever else was said and keep this only added to the hagio-obit atmosphere. It was also all of a piece with the decision not to retain (or, if it was absent in the original 16 years ago, add in) some less breezy commentary about the story of British rule over the various former parts of empire through which Palin made his way. It felt quite odd in 2020, for example, to visit Shimla – the summer capital of British India – and have the viceroy’s office pointed out to him as “the room from which a fifth of humanity was ruled”, and have the moment marked by what looked like nothing more than a nod of appreciation for the scale of our colonialist ambitions. Similarly, the romanticised take on the comfortless life of the people Palin meets as he treks through Nepal and up Annapurna wouldn’t quite pass muster today. Again, things may have had a different slant and a more holistic view in the full-length version. But if so, a sense of the depths as well as the literal heights Palin attained should at least have been evoked. And if a deeper interrogation of the places and people he came across then wasn’t there originally, it seemed a wasted opportunity not to let him add some reflective grist to the mill now. Still, whatever its flaws, this did what Palin always tries to do. It filled you with the beauty and the wildness and the strangeness of every place, provided perspective, and reawakened you to you and your own culture’s tiny, fleeting importance in the grand scheme of things. Maybe we shouldn’t ask for more from a travel documentary. Stop moaning, Mangan.